Smokers who want to quit 'benefit from text message support'

Motivational text messages could help people to quit smoking, according to a new trial led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Researchers recruited 5,800 smokers who wanted to quit and assigned them to one of two groups.

The first group received five motivational text messages a day for the first five weeks, followed by three per day for the next 26 weeks.

People in the second group received fortnightly messages that merely thanked them for taking part in the trial or asked for contact details.

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After six months, participants provided saliva samples to confirm whether they had successfully quit smoking.

Publishing their findings in the Lancet medical journal, the study authors revealed that 10.7 per cent of people in the study group had quit, compared with just 4.9 per cent of the control group.

Professor Max Parmar, director of the Medical Research Council clinical trials unit, said: 'By carrying out a large-scale trial like this to see whether text messages can help people truly free themselves of their addiction, this research has shown that texting could be a powerful tool to help people to walk away from cigarettes for good.'

New research by Sainsbury's Finance suggests that many people who describe themselves as non-smokers are actually 'social smokers' who have the occasional cigarette.

The poll found that 31 per cent of these individuals succumb after drinking alcohol, while 13 per cent light up in the presence of smokers.

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